In the early 1770s, American colonists furious over British meddling in their trade of a key agricultural product finally had enough and rose up – an act of rebellion that would ultimately spark a revolution. But this wasn’t the Boston Tea Party. It was the Pine Tree Riot – a bit of rural lawbreaking by some New Hampshire residents that would inspire their Massachusetts brethren a year later. And it’s just one of the myriad ways that evergreens have played a transformative role in human history – chronicled in “Evergreen,” a new book by Trent Preszler, M.S., Ph.D., a professor in the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business. …[The book] includes the trees’ connection to slavery in the Deep South, where workers were forced to clear-cut land for cotton cultivation; the environmental toll of today’s artificial Christmas trees, which Preszler decries as yet another source of plastic waste; and how the timber industry offered an unlikely refuge for gay men in an era when homosexuality was criminalized.